Too late to start
by i love alex
Summary: A one shot based loosely on the synopsis/promo for 4x10.


A/N: A one shot based loosely on the synopsis/promo for 4x10.

* * *

The room they are locked in together is a room they once had sex in.

_Accidental_ sex in.

It had been a free period back in the fall and they'd been using an empty classroom for last minute test revisions (or rather, she was using it for last minute test revisions, he was the faux test). He can't remember who initiated it but somehow rather than revising all the dates of the latter half of the French Revolution, they wound up against the front desk with both of their jeans shoved down and her shins pushed to his back.

She completely aced the test.

Stefan tries the handle of the door again to no avail. Rebekah had fastened a hold too strong, or too supernatural for mere vampire strength. He swears loudly as Elena walks further into the room, finding the desk and touching the surface of it with the palm of her hand.

The gesture is one of assumed subtle remembrance and he leaves the trouble of the door, finding her, as he always did, far more interesting.

It's hard to tell what she's thinking lately. Or really, hard to decipher. Her thoughts from Damon's orders, however unintentional those orders were. But as he watches her now, with a curiosity that a man to a once beloved could only have, he's finding that he's desperate to know. Desperate to know if this room held to her now what it will always hold to him; he had her flush against him, her moans, though dulled and softened by the contact of his skin to her mouth, filling the empty space.

As easily as a sparked interest could have caused it, her connection to the desk breaks, her hand coming quickly back up to rejoin her body and her mind.

She turns around and her face is one he cannot remember.

"Do you have a phone?"

Elena waits, expectedly. It's not that she's frustrated by him because truthfully, she's not, her frustration sitting purely with Rebekah and with the situation. But the volume of it, her threshold of emotions still new, left her unable to disassociate that frustration from him.

She cares for him, she does but can't find it in her to remember how to care enough; he was before her as himself, not as her lover and she hates that he can't separate the two like she can.

Stefan smiles and then he laughs, shaking his head because this day had pretty much gone from being a pain in his ass, to being a pain forming and sticking against his chest. Her blank expression he knows is not hers to truly own but it stings like she has violently hit him.

"Why? You hoping Damon's available to save the day?"

Elena wraps her fingers beneath the edge of the desk so as not to turn them into sharp, balled fists.

"You always turn everything into being about Damon." It's a scoff and also a placation. Sirebond or not, she'd give as good as she got.

It was beginning to grow increasingly more difficult, her on that desk without the thoughts stuffing his head, the ones that had been suffocating him all through the night. It took hours to bargain with Caroline to leave him to sleep though he ran and hunted instead. Deer and mountain lions, any mammal that was big enough for him to break without destroying completely. The thoughts suffocating as he drank and tore through flesh; if she covered Damon the way she had covered him. Her sighs, her moans, her sounds and her smells. Her sex.

If he keeps looking at her, he'll say something he'll regret. He suddenly feels dizzy. He turns around and goes back to the handle, shaking at it again. It rattles so much so that he's afraid he'll snap it right off and he drops his hand, hearing his own breathing; raged and raw.

He recognizes the sound because it's a sound he's heard many times before; the noise the animal he were either about to kill or feed from, breathing out their pain or death.

Elena behind him is a shadow, however distant, and this used to calm him. It now berates him, stripping him of who he was, striping him of memories and of the way she used to feel so mirrored as it used to be, to the way he felt.

So unbelievably in love.

"Were you ever going to tell me?" However rough his voice feels in his throat, the words are quietly spoken aloud.

It takes her a couple seconds as she aligns the dots and figures out the pattern; he knows, she thinks. And for some reason, the idea of that creates a chain like reaction and affect, her own throat now aching. She swallows, trying to get rid of it, watching his back. She could read him like she were reading words across a book detailed only for her; clear and obvious to her eyes, sometimes a mystery and a mask to others.

"Did Caroline tell you?"

He finally turns to look at her and he's indigent, which she admittedly knows she deserves because it didn't matter. It mattered that Caroline, anybody else, had to be the one to tell him at all.

"I wanted to. I was going to. I was worried how you were going to take it."

The door is mercifully close enough behind him that he can lean against it without it appearing as though he needed help to stand.

He tries to pull himself and his face together enough to produce a laugh bitter enough to disillusion the truth and the facts and that he was standing in this room with this stranger who he loved so passionately and so completely.

But the laugh comes out as a choke and the facts and this room are tumultuous and relentless, unwilling to let him forget.

Stefan turns back around, trying the door again.

"Stefan." Elena starts softly, a steady resolve even while he was shuddering and violently shaking a door with no release. The urge to press her hands to his back, in some way to sooth him comes out of nowhere and is so disarming that it stuns her into being unable to move at all.

"Damn it!"

"It's not like it happened on purpose but…but Stefan I love him."

The handle snaps off completely and he picks it up and throws it, so hard it hits the back wall, denting it.

The silence that follows is deafening. She can't move, she can only stare at him and swallows quietly, feeling as though if the sound were louder, the earth might crack at her feet.

"I don't want to talk about this anymore."

They both move, almost as though they were moving to music; she steps closer and he lets his body turn and fall away from the door, closer to her, like he were being pushed in a direction he had no control over moving in.

"Don't you want me to be happy?"

"Stop."

"Stefan…"

And with a word, with his name, a sound that so surely would ease his mind just weeks ago, manages to curl like a sword through his throat and out from his mouth.

"What is there to talk about? How many more ways can you rip my heart out?" He screams at her and she looks dumbfounded, stuck, chained. How he feels. How he wants to punch out and thrash at something invisible because it wasn't her fault any less than it was his.

He kicks the door, letting out what had been quickly and quietly building within him and tries to calm down. Tries not to look at her anymore than he has too. Tries now, only to care for himself.

But she was interwoven, she was encased in parts of him that had no knowledge of disconnect. That had no purpose but to swim and run and fly beside her.

He would always be in love with her. Always.

"Sorry." He half whispers, half pants, his breathing still uneven.

She doesn't say a word and for a second, he's worried enough to glance over at her and finds her standing there perfectly still, her lips drawn tight. He can tell she's trying not to cry like he can tell most things about her. Her favorite season. What parts of the world she most wanted to see. How she had wanted many things as a child, many things that were now impossible as a vampire.

He's sorry and tired and weak but can't go to her, like he wants to. He won't go to her because the distance between them had been set up like boundaries not to be broken.

They spend minutes looking at one another. She's crying long before she notices it and his arms are sharp holds by his sides.

"Do you want the cure because it'll break the sire bond or do you want the cure because you know it'll break me and Damon? Because I meant what I told you before Stefan, that girl you fell in love with, that girl you keep hoping will come back to you, she's gone."

Is she? He thinks but won't say. He's thought for many days about it, even before she had told him anything and had come to a conclusion that both emptied him but motivated him still to find the cure anyway.

"Because it'll mean that the woman standing in front of me will be able to make her own decisions on who or what determines her own happiness."

She hears the word happiness above any other and something in her begins to throb, begins to push and push and push against it. She had never questioned it because it seemed to be right there in front of her, easy to grasp, easy to have because Damon was happy.

Damon _was_ happy.

"You don't think I'm happy?" She asks, flicking her eyes over the floor, hoping that if she were to lie against it, he would let her.

But of course, of course he would.

He doesn't answer because he doesn't need to and the ground they both find themselves resting on is no longer impossible to navigate but impossible to see the end of.

"I'm sorry, Elena."

"I should've been honest with you. From the beginning. The second I couldn't swallow down blood. I didn't trust you and that might be because of what's happening with Damon but a lot of it has to do with what happened when you were gone last summer, when you came back." She tells him, staring up at the ceiling from where she had spread herself out on the floor.

Stefan props his head back, pulling his knees up, his chest tightening, "I should've realized sooner. I should have told you. I should have just…talked to you."

She tilts her head to the side, just so she can see him and meets his eyes. She opens her mouth to say something just as the door behind his head gets pulled open. It's unclear how it opened or by who for a moment, Stefan disorientated and Elena coming up to stand at a ready position but Rebekah appears, wearing a slick grin and black heels that step on either side of his body.

"Well well well, what have we got ourselves here, a couple of delinquents."

She kicks Stefan in the stomach but just as Elena protests, coming forward, Rebekah spins around, rips him out of the doorway and re-slams and locks the door leaving Elena flush against it, pounding and pounding, calling out his name.

If she had felt isolated with him in the room, so distanced they were, she feels crushingly lonely with him no longer there.

Elena begins to pace.

* * *

Rebekah slams his head hard against a bookshelf and drops him to the ground, the school library her playground before her.

"I blame myself really, believing for even a second anything that came out of your mouth. You're just as pathetic as your brother."

At the mention of Damon, the pain from his head only intensifies and he struggles to suppress the moan, knowing her satisfaction would bloom from it.

But she's noticed something, something he couldn't mask and a lazy, slippery smile appears; he knows what's going to come next, determined not to give her any more leverage than she already had. The longer he could keep her in here with him, the better chance Elena had to escape unharmed.

"What? Hit a nerve? Let me guess, another Salvatore roe over a girl who couldn't be any more valuable to save than their relationship."

He grunts, realizing as he shuffled up from the floor that his head was bleeding and as he stands there's a pain in his side he hadn't noticed before. From what he could guess without looking, he had a broken rib. It was healing though not fast enough to keep from winding him.

"Couldn't get anything out of your BFF either, but you wouldn't have to be a complete genius to guess that you and Elena aren't as fit to be mortal lovers as you thought. Too bad. You made it seem so…romantic."

He comes forward, teeth beared but is met with her fist and another kick to his stomach; he topples backwards, knocking into the bookshelf with such a force that it almost tips over. For a couple seconds, he lets himself breathe it out, huddled there on the floor, his rib re-broken. He re-evaluates from the information Rebekah had just given him, that she had Caroline locked up in the school as well. Fear increasingly pools within him; he had to find Caroline.

"Rebekah, I know, I know I betrayed you. And your brother, Klaus…he's."

"Feeling progressively less forgiving each time his sister happens to reawaken from being fittingly dead."

He hadn't seen nor heard him coming and guesses from Rebekah's expression that she hadn't either. Klaus' eyes leave Rebekah and land on Stefan.

"Old friend, it seems that you owe me yet again."

In the time it takes Rebekah to move, Klaus has disappeared. Rebekah looks in the direction he once was before turning back to Stefan and he knows even before she's got her hands wrapped around his neck that she was going to kill him.

"You're lucky my brother is unwavering in his efforts to continuously save your life." And with a flick of her wrist, blackness covers him and he hits the ground.

* * *

Elena forms a plan quickly; she snaps the legs off the bottom of a chair and throws them like darts at the windowpane, situated at the top of the wall that faced the hallway. The glass breaks but doesn't shatter and she starts at a run from the opposite wall, throwing herself at the small frame and smashing through the glass completely. Her body comes hurling out and she smacks into a row of lockers, glass in her hair and blood on her hands. She's only marginally hurt though and she stands quickly, tuning her ears and eyes.

If she could hear him, she could find him. But for minutes, it's silent. No feet, no voices. No breathing. She wills herself not to panic and to rationalize; she couldn't hear him because Rebekah had taken him from the school. She couldn't hear him because he was too far away. She couldn't hear him because she had spent days no longer listening for the sound.

Elena sways on the spot, she wasn't dizzy but the smell of her own blood was like a stench in the air she couldn't ignore. She's rubbing her hands against her jeans when, like a signal, neon and broad in the middle of the night, she hears it.

"Library." He whispers and she's moving before she's aware that she's using her legs to run as a human and not as a vampire. Her legs carry her through hallways and open doors and she's moving without thought, without reservation, letting his voice direct her past classrooms until she's rounding the corner and he's there. He's in a heap on the floor, books and his own blood surrounding him but he's there.

"Stefan." And she's against it, she's holding herself fast to it. I remember, she wants to say but can't find the words, dropping herself down beside him, taking his hand like she were taking back his life.

"It's okay." She breathes and finds that it's sticking like glue between them, "It's going to be okay."

* * *

The two of them drop Caroline home and he can tell Caroline wants to say something though doesn't, giving him a hard look before shutting her front door. He'll call her tonight, or maybe stop by, depending on how lonely he felt and how much scotch he could get his hands on.

Depending solely, on how he left Elena.

It had been too much, today, locked in the room and then later with her nursing him in the library. She's quiet all the way back to her house but she lingers almost as much as he does walking up to her front door, like she didn't want to leave where they were any less than he did.

She touches the door handle and then hesitates and though that is a gift, her house now another boundary, it is also a reminder that the person she'll call later tonight, the person she'll want to talk to, won't be him.

He wonders when talking to her became something so far from trivial that it makes him ache at the loss.

"Thank you…for taking me home."

"Of course." He nods, beginning to twist his body in a direction that makes him feel practically lucid, when she reaches for him.

"Would it be selfish if I asked you not to stop?"

She has him by an elbow and barely and it's as intimate a touch as any between them has been within the last 24 hours. Last week.

Searching for the cure, he realizes after seconds have gone by without him giving her an answer and he wills himself to look up from the porch and into her eyes.

"No," He tells her and takes back his arm, though notices and folds it within the sheets of his memory, the way her fingers had tightened and gripped him from making the release, "It wouldn't be selfish at all. Goodnight, Elena."

No matter what happens.

"Goodnight Stefan."

She can't answer why it seems that although the need to crawl inside and onto her bed to cradle a phone that were her only connection to Damon was overwhelming, the need to watch her ex-lover walk away from her was far greater.

You were the best choice I ever made.

* * *

A/N: A happy 'Stefan and Elena are still madly in love' piece is coming shortly to make up for all the angst, promise.


End file.
